How to Negotiate Your Salary

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Read time: 2.5 minutes

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PARTY PLAN 🎉

💸 How to negotiate your salary

🤨 RTO mandates

📷 Employees wearing body cams?!

And, of course, MEMES!

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PAY

How to Negotiate Your Salary

56% of U.S. workers are looking or planning to look for a new job in 2025, according to an October 2024 Resume Templates survey of 1,258 U.S. workers. Their reasons vary: 37% feel undervalued, another 37% feel burned out and 40% cite low pay.

Alison Fragale is a professor of organization psychology and author of “Likeable Badass.” Here are her top three tips for salary negotiation in 2025:

• “What do I want?”

  • Hone in on the salary you want, then find data to prove why that goal is realistic. BLS and sites like Levels.fyi, ZipRecruiter, and Payscale all list salary ranges and averages for various jobs and industries. Fragale also suggests talking to a friend who works in the industry or trying to find someone in your company who’s willing to talk about what internal salary ranges look like.

• “What’s a win for the other party?”

  • “The best justifications are always in terms of what’s a win for the other party. People are generally going to say yes to you when they highly value what you’re offering.” -Alison Fragale.

  • Quantifying your achievements over time can make it look like a slam dunk for the other party to give you what you’re asking for. Some jobs make it easy, such as sales. It’s easy to justify more compensation for someone who is directly bringing in a lot of revenue. For other jobs, you may have to get creative. Fragale suggests keeping an electronic record of all your achievements at the company, and throughout your entire career.

• “Start this conversation before you’re desperate.”

  • Bring it up to your manager early in 2025, then ask, “when should I follow up with you about this again?” That way you’re not asking with one foot out the door, and you have a sense for when you can get an update down the line.

WORKPLACE

Return to Office Mandates

Corporate employees and employers across industries have conflicted about what style results in the most productive work while still allowing balance.

The push and pull between remote, hybrid, and office work has persisted since companies started to call their staff back in person. 32% of U.S. firms require full-time in office for corporate employees, per the Flex Index Q4 report, which analyzes the state of flexible work.

Here is an updated list of major companies that want employees back in the office:

• Amazon: Employees are mandated to return five days per week at the start of 2025, CEO Andy Jassy announced in September.

• Apple: CEO Tim Cook ordered employees to start returning to the office three days a week in 2022.

• AT&T: The company announced in December announced a policy that will require employees to work from the office five days per week starting in January, multiple outlets reported.

• Dell: The tech company told staff with just a few days' notice in September to return to the office five days per week.

• IBM: The company told managers they needed to either be on-site three days per week or leave their jobs.

• Meta: The Facebook and Instagram parent company ordered workers to return to the office three days per week in 2023.

• Salesforce: Many employees returned for four days per week in October.

• Snap: Snapchat's parent company told employees they had 60 days to return to the office or leave the company.

• X: Elon Musk in 2022 announced the end of remote work for the social media company after he acquired it. It became the first company in tech to force RTO.

• Zoom: The bastion of remote work ordered staff back to the office in 2023 for a "structured hybrid approach."

• BlackRock: The world's largest asset manager called employees back to office at least four days per week in 2023.

• Citigroup: The banking and trade company asked its 600 U.S. employees who were eligible to work remotely to return to the office full time in May.

• Goldman Sachs: The company early on had a hard time enforcing its five-day RTO policy, per Business Insider. Leaders said they'd further crack down on attendance.

• JPMorgan: In 2023, the company asked its managing directors to work from the office five days per week.

• Disney: CEO Bob Iger ordered a four-day workweek in 2023 after retaking his job at the helm of the company.

• Washington Post: The news outlet announced in November that all employees were expected back five days per week by June.

• Boeing: The aerospace company called all workers back to the office five days per week in early 2024.

• Tesla: Musk in 2022 said that employees must work from the office at least 40 hours per week.

• **86% of CEOs said they will reward employees who come into the office, per a survey conducted by accounting and audit firm KPMG over the summer. 79% said they believe corporate employees will work in person over the next three years.

INTERESTING

Workers Wearing Body Cams?!

Last month, Walmart announced a new pilot program in the name of employee safety. Select employees will begin wearing body cameras while they’re clocked in at work. The body camera initiative is focused on worker safety and is not related to loss prevention or theft, according to a person with knowledge of the situation. Walmart is currently testing the technology at a handful of stores in the Dallas market.

An NRF study in collaboration with the Loss Prevention Research Council and SensorMatic that found about 91% of the senior loss prevention and retail industry security executives surveyed said shoplifter violence and aggression has risen compared to 2019.

According to 84% of those polled in the survey, violence during a crime has become more of a concern than it was a year ago.

Fifty five percent said guest-related violence was more of a concern, 40% cited employee-related violence and 34% named mass violence or an active assailant.

Critics of the new initiative have cited employee privacy concerns. Some say the body cameras are just another way to monitor employee productivity while masquerading as a “security initiative.”

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